


handwritten destiny

by prettylittlesestras



Category: Pitch Perfect (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 15:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19908229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettylittlesestras/pseuds/prettylittlesestras
Summary: this is kind of a riff on the tried and true soulmates au where the first thing your soulmate says to you is tattooed on your body, but it has a different sort of twist.bechloe soulmate au written for bechloe week 2019 day 1 -- soulmates





	handwritten destiny

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warning -- cutting/self harm

Beca sighs as she watches the last few people fold up their metal chairs and file out of the room. The only person left is Jill, the leader of the support group. She looks around slowly--memorizing; the bricks, the posters on the wall, even the cold metal chairs. She doesn’t want to forget this place.

It’s ironic really. Her first day attending the S.A.F.E. Alternatives group was a nightmare. She was fourteen, and her mom dropped her off and sat outside in her car for two hours waiting for her. Beca sat in the bathroom for the entirety of the class. When her mom found out she didn’t actually go, she brought her back every week for four months and sat on a bench outside the meeting room and read, quietly ensuring Beca’s attendance.

She’d looked around at the posters on the walls and scoffed. _Self Abuse Finally Ends? They couldn’t come up with a better acronym than that?_

She didn’t say a single word for eight straight meetings. She sat in her chair with her arms crossed and distracted herself by thinking of anything other than the reason she was there. It was hard for Beca, being vulnerable. She didn’t need people in her head: knowing how she felt, why she did the things that she did, or trying to analyze her. They wouldn’t understand anyway.

Eventually though, she gave in. She started participating in the sessions, and somehow, it actually started helping.

And now, as she stands in front of the room where she’s spent two nights a week for the last four and a half years and reflects, as lame as it sounds, she decides that continuing to come to the meetings was one of the best decisions she’s made in her eighteen years of living. 

“Okay, so you’ll find a new group when you get settled into Barden, right?” Jill asks with tears welling up in her eyes, clearly not ready for Beca to move away to college.

“Don’t go all soft on me now, Jill. And of course. I’m sure there’s something around campus I can check out once I get there. Not that I really need it anymore. It’s been over a year,” Beca teases as she grins and rolls her eyes. She knows that’s not exactly what Jill wants to hear but that the promise of finding a new group on campus will satisfy her.

“Well, you know our doors are always open when you’re home for breaks.” Jill wipes away one single tear from her eye and wraps Beca into a hug. Beca tolerates the physical contact for as long as she can and then squirms away and grabs the box full of gifts from her other group members. She exists the community center and shuts the door behind her, feeling like she’s shut the door to a part of her life as well.

* * *

The first time was the week her dad left. He left on a random Tuesday in April. To say it was a surprise to Beca would be an understatement. The Friday before he left was the best day she’d had in a while. It was the first warm day of Spring, and he took her out for frozen yogurt (“mint chocolate chip with extra chocolate sprinkles, please”), and they came home and he played the guitar while she sang along to every song. She went to sleep smiling that night because she was just _so_ happy. And four days later he was gone. 

She wasn’t stupid; she was always in earshot when her parents would fight. They couldn’t seem to agree on anything, and the fighting had gone from being an every-now-and-then happening to an everyday occurrence. But she didn’t know that meant he would leave them. He left Beca a note in her chair at the kitchen table; she had read about half of it when she realized what was happening. She ripped the paper into shreds and left them there on the table where she’d been sitting. 

She went to her room and refused to come out, locking the door and yelling at her mother if she dared to knock. It wasn’t her fault, and maybe deep down Beca knew that, but the blame fell on her, at least in Beca’s eyes. Her mom left her meals outside her door. Beca picked at her food, eating some but leaving most of it sitting on the plate it came on. She was nothing if not dramatic, but just this once, her dramatics seemed justified. 

She laid in her bed and cried for three days straight. She cried until the only thing she felt was empty. Alone and empty. In all actuality, she wasn’t alone. If no one else, she had her mom, but it didn’t matter. She shut her out. She shut everyone out.

And then she felt nothing; it was like she had expended every ounce of emotion that had been stored in her body, and once the flood of emotion was over, there was nothing left. Ten years old, and she couldn’t remember how to feel. She felt angry and sad and betrayed all while feeling like an emotionless void, feeling everything and nothing all at once. She was detached and numb for what felt like weeks until she decided she needed to feel _something_. 

She rummaged through the kitchen drawers until she found the small paring knife with the baby blue handle. She knew it was the sharpest knife they had because her dad wouldn’t even let her touch it; she nicked her finger with it once while helping her dad unload the dishwasher. From then on, he handled the cutlery. But he wasn’t around to tell her what she could and couldn't do, was he?

She decided on the bottom of her foot. It was the only place she could think of that no one would see it. She sat down on the kitchen floor, the floor tiles cold beneath her legs. She took a deep breath and began to carve the word **_gone_** into the bottom of her left foot. It hurt tremendously, but that was what she wanted. It hurt more than remembering the fact that her dad was gone. It somehow helped her forget. When she finally got the blood to stop leaking from the cuts, she cleaned up her mess, washed the knife, placed it back in the utensil drawer, and limped back to her room.

For the months that followed, she could feel the scar on her foot with every step that she took. The pain, though it faded as time went on, kept her grounded. It helped her remember what her dad had done but also helped her to remember that there are things that hurt worse.

* * *

The second time was almost four years later. Her grandmother died on the eve of Beca’s fourteenth birthday. Her namesake, her best friend, her safe place, and the only person who was able to pick up Beca’s pieces after her dad left and fuse them back together with laughter and homemade strawberry jam was now gone. She died suddenly: a heart attack at home on a warm Sunday afternoon. It hadn’t been expected at all, and it was hard for Beca to decide whether it would have hurt less if her grandmother had been sick and they could have seen it coming. But it was irrelevant, she was just gone. 

Three days after the funeral, Beca was at her grandmother’s house going through her things, setting aside a few keepsakes to take back home with her. While her mom went into town to run errands and pick up their Chinese food for dinner, Beca laid on her grandmother’s bed unable to do anything but cry. While rummaging through the nightstand to find a tissue, she ran across a small silver pocket knife. She rolled it around in her hand. 

After little to no contemplation, she stumbled to the bathroom, tears still clouding her vision. She sat on the edge of the cold porcelain tub, rolled up her sleeve, and etched the word **_hurt_** into the skin on her inner bicep. She was begging for something to hurt worse than the pain she was feeling. Something to take her mind off of the pain that had consumed her for days. And hurt it did. With each drag of the knife, she let out a muffled yell through the towel she was biting down on. 

When the word was sufficiently carved into her skin, she cleaned up and tied the small towel from her mouth around her arm in an effort to apply pressure and stop the bleeding. She pushed her sleeve back down and went on about her business, her mom never the wiser.

That is...until she was. Five days later, Beca came down with the flu. It was strange, really, because who gets the flu in July? Beca Mitchell apparently. Her mom came in to check her temperature while she was sleeping and saw the cuts on her arm. She never said anything to Beca about it. It was her mom’s typical way of parenting: avoidance. Beca didn’t really mind though. She’d rather it be that way than have to have awkward or embarrassing conversations with her. She just left a flyer for the S.A.F.E. Alternatives group hung on the refrigerator with the date and time of the meeting circled, and when the time came, she dropped her off at the meeting.

* * *

It only happened one other time. She was seventeen and her high school boyfriend broke her heart. They’d been together for two years, and she felt like she was finally ready to love someone. Beca Mitchell does not throw around the word “love” carelessly. She puts up wall after wall to protect herself because when it comes to love, it feels like admitting she loves someone is the first step on the road to losing that person. Her dad. Her grandma. She wasn’t ready for that to happen again. Marcus knew how Beca felt and her reasoning behind it, and he was always content with how things were, never pushing Beca to say or do things she wasn’t ready for. 

The day she realized she might actually love Marcus was a blustery November morning. It was windy and rainy and cold, not usually the kind of weather one associates with love, but something felt different when she woke up that morning. But when Beca got to school, Marcus wasn’t there to meet her at their lockers before class. She had pondered on it all morning as she got ready and drove to school and thought about telling him that morning, but when he didn’t show, something felt off. 

With about fifteen minutes to spare before first period, she walked down the hall toward the band room where Marcus sometimes hung out. When she rounded the corner, there he was, tucked away in a corner kissing some girl whose name might have been Abigail. Beca was unsure, and honestly it didn’t matter. When the shock of seeing her boyfriend kissing someone else hit, Beca dropped her books to the ground, the noise breaking Marcus away from the girl instantly. But it was too late. 

Beca gathered her books from the ground and started running. He called after her, but she kept running, faster and faster. She ran out the side door of the school and into the parking lot. She ran through the cold and the wind and the rain, all without being fazed. She ran until the reached her car, and then she drove home. Her car shook as it reached speeds well above the speed limit. She drove faster than a fifteen-year-old car should probably ever go, but she didn’t care. She pressed the gas pedal down further and urged it to accelerate even more. She wanted to get away as quickly as she could. Away from Marcus. Away from her feelings. Away from the pain of betrayal that she felt. Away from all of it.

Her tires screeched as she slammed on the breaks and her car came to a halt in the driveway. Her hands shook as she fumbled with her keys, eventually jamming the right one into the lock on the front door. She streaked through the hallway and into the kitchen where she threw open the utensil drawer and grabbed a knife. It didn’t matter which one as long as it was sharp enough to get the job done. She sank to the floor right there in the middle of the kitchen. She struggled to shimmy out of her skinny jeans, but when they were down around her knees, she sliced into the skin at the very top of her thigh, engraving it with the word that had been running over and over in her head since the moment she saw her boyfriend kissing another girl: **_fast_**. She cried out in pain, but hurting her body was the only way she knew how to escape the pain she felt inside.

It felt good to hurt, but when the pain subsided, all that was left was shame. Beca was ashamed that she’d resorted back to cutting, and she was even more ashamed that there was virtually no hesitation; she felt like that’s what she needed to do, and she did it. She skipped the next three support group meetings. After the third missed meeting and fifth unanswered and unreturned phone call from Jill, She found Jill waiting on her doorstep after school. As much as Beca hated admitting her failure, Jill was there for her when she needed someone to help pull her out of her downward spiral, and that’s why Jill is the person she’ll miss most when she goes off to Barden.

But it has to happen, and Beca’s secretly excited about meeting new people and experiencing whatever new things Barden has to offer. Her bags have been packed for two weeks, and when it’s finally move-in day, they load up the back of her mom’s truck and drive the nine hours to Barden University.

Her mom cries when she drops her off, but the tears feel forced, and Beca just rolls her eyes and gives her mother a goodbye hug. Their relationship had always been strained, but they’d both become more and more distant from each other with each passing year. _Some time apart should do us some good_ , Beca thinks as she watches her mom drive away from the school.

* * *

The first week of school was uneventful. Classes were fine but boring. Beca estimated that the food was probably slightly below average but still better than she expected. She hadn’t really met anyone aside from her roommate Kimmy Jin who didn’t seem too keen on becoming friends.

Nothing of note really happened until the Barden University Activities Fair. Beca assumed that most clubs the Barden had to offer would probably be lame and not really her speed, but she went anyway to give herself something to do. And just as she expected, they were lame. There were balls were flying from one sports club booth to another, people reading passages from the Bible at the religion booth, and nerds in chefs hats holding whisks and spouting off French words at the cooking club booth. She thought she might be able to find some information on a new support group, but she found nothing of the sort.

No one even spoke to Beca until a ginger-haired girl with a sunny disposition called out to her as she passed by one of the booths. 

“Hi! Any interest in joining our a cappella group?” The girl asks as she hands Beca a flyer. Beca looks down to read the flyer. ‘Barden Bellas: Competitive A Cappella Group’. Beca bites the inside of her cheek to keep from smirking.

“Oh, right. This is like a thing now,” Beca squeaks out. It’s the nicest response she can think of at the time. There’s a tall girl with blonde hair also standing at the booth who gives her a death glare.

“Oh, totes. We sing covers of songs, but we do it without any instruments. It’s all from our mouths.” 

Beca can feel the enthusiasm and passion radiating off of the girl, so she decides that a sarcastic response would probably isn’t the best way to go, but “yikes” escapes her lips before she can stop it. She’s wanted to be a music producer since the age of nine, but this isn’t exactly what she had in mind when she thought of getting her foot in the door in the music world.

“Okay, well I’ll give it some thought and let you guys know.” Beca turns to leave, but the girl touches her arm and speaks again. The spot on her arm where the girl touched tingles, but Beca ignores it.

She hands Beca a small card as she speaks, “We’ll be here until about four today, but here’s my number. You can shoot me a text if you come back by and we’re already gone.”

Beca tries to muffle the gasp that slips her lips, but she’s unsure if it’s audible to the redhead or not. **_Gone_** on the bottom of her foot burns as if she’s stepped barefoot on the sidewalk in the middle of July. She jerks her foot off of the ground, but it provides no relief as it’s not the ground that’s causing her foot to burn.

“Thanks,” she practically shouts as she hurries back to her dorm, feeling the need to limp because of the pain in her foot but ignoring it. When she gets back to her room, she rips off her shoe to look at the bottom of her foot, but it looks normal. It’s unchanged, and yet, the pain is unrelenting. It takes three hours with a cold towel on her foot for the pain to stop. She has no idea what caused the pain, so she’s forced to carry on with her daily activities as if it never happened.

* * *

Days go by, and Beca starts to get into the routine of college. Breakfast, class, break, lunch, class, study, dinner, study, make mixes on her laptop, sleep, repeat. Three weeks into the school year, Beca starts to get annoyed with the monotony of it all. She sits at her desk trying to write a paper for her Intro to Philosophy class but can’t seem to get her thoughts out onto paper. She starts scrounging around in her desk drawers until she finally finds the little card she’s looking for. She holds it in her hand, turning it over and over while she thinks. On one side there are two B’s printed, presumably standing for Barden Bellas, and on the other side is “Chloe Beale” and a phone number. 

She seriously considers texting Chloe just to give herself something to do, but decides against it and chooses to go take a shower instead to clear her head. Communal showers were disgusting and a headache at first, but Beca’s gotten used to them. She heads down to the bathroom and turns on the shower, singing David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’ while the water warms up. She enters the shower and sings louder, not really noticing anyone else in the room until Chloe Beale is peering into her shower and exclaiming “You can sing!”

Beca lets out a small scream, startled by the redhead, and grabs the shower curtain to cover herself. Chloe stands there stark naked, unashamed of her body, and tries to convince Beca to sing with her. She pleads until Beca doesn’t know what to do other than give the girl what she wants, so eventually, Beca gives in and they sing Titanium together right there in the shower. It’s certainly something Beca never could have predicted happening in her first month of college.

Chloe finally returns to her own shower and lets Beca continue bathing. When she hears Chloe turn off her shower and leave the bathroom, she lets out a sigh of relief, having had more than enough discomfort for one evening.

The door opens again, and Chloe pops her head in for one last word. “I hope you know you _have_ to audition for the Bellas now that I know you can sing. Auditions are tomorrow night at seven in the auditorium. You have to come, or my feelings will really be hurt,” Chloe shouts, loud enough for Beca to hear her over the shower.

She leaves without another word, and Beca’s relieved that she’s gone. She lets out a pain-induced groan, and her hand flies to her arm where the word **_hurt_** burns agonizingly. She turns the shower knob as far to the right as it will go, but the water still isn’t cold enough to provide any relief to the sudden pain.

She finishes rinsing her hair and hurries back to her room, only stopping to grab some ice from the in the dorm lobby. She numbs her scars with ice enough to stop the pain after about an hour. She still doesn’t know what’s causing the pain, but Beca’s come to the conclusion that it has something to do with Chloe Beale, and she has an overwhelming urge to find out why.

* * *

Were it not for her curiosity about the severe pain in her scars, she would have skipped out on the auditions altogether, but Beca can’t let it go. And if she’s being honest, she’s drawn to Chloe even aside from the mysterious pain; she’s intrigued by her.

Beca’s late to the auditions because her attendance was a last-minute decision. She debated all day about whether or not to go, but in the end, her curiosity got the better of her, and she was the last to enter the auditorium. The audition leader instructs her to sing her own rendition of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since U Been Gone’, but she’s unprepared and doesn’t have it prepared. Beca looks out into the audience from the stage, and there in the front row sits Chloe, beaming with surprise and pride, and she instructs Beca to sing anything she wants.

The audition goes better than Beca had expected, and she’s actually proud of herself for doing it. The next day, she finds a blue envelope taped to her door. The envelope is sealed with two B’s stamped in golden wax--the level of extra she can assume only comes from the Barden Bellas.

There’s a letter within the envelope that instructs her to attend the “Hood NIght Ceremony” in the auditorium basement at 9PM on Saturday but gives no other instructions or clues to what it might entail.

When Saturday rolls around, Beca is a ball of anxiety which is a change from her usual apathetic attitude. When she enters the auditorium basement, her eyes find Chloe immediately, and her nerves are slightly eased when the redhead smiles back at her. Beca is inducted into the Barden Bellas as one of the altos, and then Aubrey, the snarky blonde from the activities fair, leads the new members in a ritual that includes drinking “the blood of the sisters that came before” her. They’re all obviously apprehensive, but Chloe reassures them that it’s actually just wine.

The entire induction ceremony is weird, and Beca wonders what she might have just gotten herself into. She feels better, though, when they all exit the auditorium and move the group over to an a cappella party being held in the amphitheater. Drunk people abound, and after a drink and a half, Beca feels more at ease than she has in weeks. She stands alone, content with watching students drink and dance and traipse up and down the steps of the amphitheater. 

Her eyes find Chloe again, and she watches her dance with ease. Her body moves fluidly, and Beca finds herself smiling as she watches. When the song is over, their eyes meet, and Chloe walks up the steps with two drinks in-hand. She sets them both down on the step in front of them and grabs both of Beca’s hands. Her hands tingle where their hands touch, but Beca chalks it up to the alcohol.

Chloe leans forward and pulls Beca forward toward her. For a split second, Beca’s sure Chloe is about to kiss her, but their faces stop no more than two inches from each other. She’s concerned that Chloe might have kissed her, but she’s even more concerned that in that moment, maybe she might have wanted her to. Chloe looks into her eyes and says, “I’m so glad that I met you,” and while Beca wants to believe that she’s being honest, she can smell the alcohol on Chloe’s breath, so she doesn’t know what to think.

She just smiles and replies with a quick, “me too”.

And she is glad. She’s only been around Chloe a handful of times, but she feels like Chloe’s the kind of person that you always want to be around and be friends with, and she’s made Beca feel more welcome around her than anywhere else at Barden thus far.

Chloe’s eyes don’t leave hers, and she says, “I think we’re going to be really fast friends.”

Beca clears her throat to hide the fact that she wants to scream as **_fast_** on her thigh begins to burn uncontrollably. She leans down and grabs one of the drinks that Chloe had set on the step in front of them and drains the contents of the cup in one gulp, hoping the alcohol will help numb the pain in her leg. It doesn’t, but after two more drinks, the pain starts to subside.

When some of the partygoers begin to go back to their dorms, the crowd on the dance floor starts to lessen, and Chloe takes Beca by the hand and leads her to the middle. Beca is four drinks in and is able to let loose more than her personality would typically allow her. The pain in all three of her scars pulses with the beat of the music, but Beca ignores it. They dance for what feels like minutes, but when the DJ turns the music off and the lights go out, they realize it’s later than they realized. 

Not ready to go to sleep yet, the two go for a walk around campus, and Chloe shows Beca around her favorite spots. They end up at an old, abandoned pool; they sit on the edge and dangle their legs over what would be the deep end of the pool. They sit wordlessly for a while, content with sitting in silence and enjoying each other’s company as well as the buzz they’re both feeling.

Eventually, Beca looks over at Chloe. “I’m really glad we met, too. I know we barely know each other, but it feels like i really _know_ you. I don’t know. It’s weird”

“No, I feel it too. I don’t know what it is, but something _made_ me talk to you that day at the activities fair. Like I just had to know you.” 

Beca swears Chloe’s inching closer to her, but she’s trying to convince herself that she’s crazy. She feels this unrelenting force pulling her forward like a magnet being attracted to its opposite pole. She fights it for what feels like forever, unsure how long it actually is.

Finally she gives in, letting her face move towards Chloe’s. Their lips crash together, and it’s every bit of relief that Beca has longed for for weeks. The scars on her body cool instantly, as if someone has injected ice into her veins, and her whole body is refreshed. Beca can feel an all-but tangible amount of electricity spark between their lips, but it’s pleasant rather than painful, and she leans into the kiss. Chloe kisses her back until they’re both smiling into the kiss and break away laughing. Chloe leans onto Beca’s chest, and they lay back onto the concrete, staring up at the stars.

She lays there, truly happy for the first time in far too long. Beca can’t stop thinking about the kiss and all of the sensations that have overtaken her body for the last few weeks. Maybe it’s just her body adjusting to being away from home, or maybe this is what it feels like to have a crush on a beautiful redheaded girl with the voice of an angel, or maybe Chloe’s her soulmate or something. Beca doesn’t know. But she has more than enough time to figure it all out.


End file.
